1912 [about 1851?], WA Territory: Murphy recounts Indians’ love of silver coins”
I think here we learn something about the origin of the still-common phrase, “shortchanging” someone!
Monthly Archive: January, 2025
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1944: Dutilly, and maybe new discoveries from Kamloops
Dutilly, Arthème. 1944. An inexhaustible source of linguistic knowledge. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87(5):403-406. (Papers on Archaeology, Ecology, Ethnology, History, Paleontology, Physics, and Physiology (May 5, 1944)).
Nice proof that Northern CJ “fol-dawn” doesn’t mean ‘fall down’!
Of course Northern-Dialect Chinook Jargon’s fol-dawn is from English ‘fall down’, but…
Poser on sizi
I just want to comment on a single Dakelh (Carrier) word in a single article by a friend of mine:
1869, OR: thank golly Jenny’s not dead!
Solidly within the frontier period, after Oregon became a state, we find this neat quotation of a Northwest Oregon Native man’s Chinuk Wawa.
1882, BC: A Jargon “happy belated New Cold-Hot”, and a Greek joke
Definitely one for our Chinuk Wawa-related humor file…and it contains a word discovery!
1859, WA: “Irregular Lines to Julia Katompka” doggerel, with more Lushootseed words
This very early (by Pacific Northwest standards) tragic love poem may have been the one that originally started the answer poems that we’ve already looked at.
‘Obey’ in 2 dialects of Chinook Jargon: an Indigenous metaphor?
In the phenomenal “Joe Peter” transcription session for this week, we saw how that elder translated ‘obey’ in the oldest, Central Dialect of Chinuk Wawa:
1895: Real-world Chinook Jargon at Sugarcane
A big gathering at Sugarcane, BC is reported on in “Kamloops Wawa” #132 (September 1895), page 133:
‘Lust’ is ‘acting like a dog’
Granted, this one counts as religious talk more than real-world Chinuk Wawa…